Enhanced Internet Reliability & Firewall Platform

The Internet has become critical to the success of business, so Internet outages can virtually halt the flow of business – causing lost time, effort, and perhaps even losing guests and homeowners to a competitor.

Internet outages can and will impact communications, email, research, credit card processing, banking, customer interaction, and much more. With our research showing many of our clients directly attributing up to 80% of their bookings to the Internet – can you afford an Internet outage for even a minimum amount of time?

For rental managers and e-commerce organizations that host their database and inventory locally – an Internet outage means that availability searches and bookings cannot be completed by potential guests. With a majority of guests at least doing research online – Internet outages could force even the most loyal of guests to search elsewhere to make purchase decisions.

For organizations whose business is dependent on their data being hosted off-site, an Internet outage can halt all internal business. Your team will not have access to your own data… imagine a rental manager who could not check-in guests on a major turn-day because they could not access their data. You could not make bookings over the phone because you would not have access to your own inventory.

The TomK Consulting Group is proud to offer a proven solution to virtually eliminate Internet outages – the deployment of an advanced firewall that has the ability to manage and load balance Internet circuits from two different Internet service providers, most often DSL and Cable.

When both circuits are up and running, your business will take advantage of the available bandwidth from both carriers, often doubling your current Internet bandwidth. If one circuit fails or is unavailable, the other circuit handles the load until the down circuit becomes available. As soon as it does, it automatically resumes its share of your Internet traffic.

“A few weeks after Tom K deployed the new firewall and added DSL, Comcast had a trunk failure affecting all of Eastern Maryland for almost 36 hours. We didn’t notice, and only knew about it when we saw it on the news. Three weeks ago this would have taken down our business. Thanks, Tom!”

“On Galveston Island, Internet service outages are frequent, but 70+% of Sand ‘N Sea’s bookings come in via the Internet. Three years ago, Tom K implemented his recommended firewall solution, and since then, we’ve had no downtime at all. The results to our bottom line have been noticeable, as is our staff’s efficiency... and their sanity!”

The cost for this solution is a one-time fee for configuration time, plus the cost of the firewall. The firewall we use in this solution normally retails for over $1,000 – but, through our research, we have been able to secure the firewall for under $600. The firewall comes with Lifetime support and firmware upgrades, plus a 2 year hardware warrantee, so there are no recurring hardware costs. The firewall has the capacity to provide 35 VPN tunnels at no additional cost.

The time required to implement the solution is dependent on the complexity of your infrastructure, typically taking around 4 hours for a basic implementation and 10 hours for our most complex implementation. While the solution is straight forward, the implementation is somewhat complex, as we load balance and provide redundancy for both outgoing and incoming traffic for multiple services.

Your organization will also need to order the second Internet circuit, which is a recurring operating expense, typically around $100/month.